21 урок для XXI века — страница extra из 23

Turkey and Russia

Resurgent Russia sees itself as a far more forceful rival of the global liberal order, but though it has reconstituted its military might, it is ideologically bankrupt. Vladimir Putin is certainly popular both in Russia and among various right-wing movements across the world, yet he has no global world view that might attract unemployed Spaniards, disgruntled Brazilians or starry-eyed students in Cambridge.

Russia does offer an alternative model to liberal democracy, but this model is not a coherent political ideology. Rather, it is a political practice in which a number of oligarchs monopolise most of a country’s wealth and power, and then use their control of the media to hide their activities and cement their rule. Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’. If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people’s lives, enough citizens will eventually realise this and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln’s logic, because it prevents citizens from realising the truth. Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others, and divert attention to external threats – either real or imaginary.

Thus Russia pretends to be a democracy, and its leadership proclaims allegiance to the values of Russian nationalism and Orthodox Christianity rather than to oligarchy. Right-wing extremists in France and Britain may well rely on Russian help and express admiration for Putin, but even their voters would not like to live in a country that actually copies the Russian model – a country with endemic corruption, malfunctioning services, no rule of law, and staggering inequality. According to some measures, Russia is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with 87 per cent of wealth concentrated in the hands of the richest 10 per cent of people. How many working-class supporters of the Front National want to copy this wealth-distribution pattern in France?

Humans vote with their feet. In my travels around the world I have met numerous people in many countries who wish to emigrate to the USA, to Germany, to Canada or to Australia. I have met a few who want to move to China or Japan. But I am yet to meet a single person who dreams of emigrating to Russia.

In Russia, Putin’s official vision is not to build a corrupt oligarchy, but rather to resurrect the old tsarist empire.

As of March 2018, I would prefer to give my data to Mark Zuckerberg than to Vladimir Putin (though the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that perhaps there isn’t much of a choice here, as any data entrusted to Zuckerberg may well find its way to Putin).

So far the only successful invasion mounted by a major power in the twenty-first century has been the Russian conquest of Crimea. In February 2014 Russian forces invaded neighbouring Ukraine and occupied the Crimean peninsula, which was subsequently annexed to Russia. With hardly any fighting, Russia gained strategically vital territory, struck fear into its neighbours, and re-established itself as a world power. However, the conquest succeeded thanks to an extraordinary set of circumstances. Neither the Ukrainian army nor the local population showed much resistance to the Russians, while other powers refrained from directly intervening in the crisis. These circumstances will be hard to reproduce elsewhere around the world. If the precondition for a successful war is the absence of enemies willing to resist the aggressor, it seriously limits the available opportunities.

Indeed, when Russia sought to reproduce its Crimean success in other parts of Ukraine, it encountered substantially stiffer opposition, and the war in eastern Ukraine bogged down into unproductive stalemate. Even worse (from Moscow’s perspective), the war has stoked anti-Russian feelings in Ukraine and turned that country from an ally into a sworn enemy. Just as success in the First Gulf War tempted the USA to overreach itself in Iraq, success in Crimea may have tempted Russia to overreach itself in Ukraine.

Пока единственным успешным вторжением, осуществленным ведущей державой в 21 веке, стало российское завоевание Крыма. В феврале 2014 года российские войска вторглись в соседнюю Украину и оккупировали Крымский полуостров, который был впоследствии аннексирован Россией. Почти без какой-либо борьбы Россия заняла стратегически важную территорию, посеяла страх в соседях и восстановила себя в качестве мировой державы. Однако завоевание закончилось успешно благодаря экстраординарному стечению обстоятельств. Ни украинская армия, ни местное население не оказали большого сопротивления россиянам, тогда как остальные державы воздержались от прямого вмешательства в конфликт. Эти обстоятельства будет сложно воспроизвести где-нибудь в мире. Если предусловие для священной войны — это отсутствие врагов, желающих сопротивляться агрессору, это серьезно ограничивает доступные возможности.

В самом деле, когда Россия пыталась повторить крымский успех в других частях Украины, она наталкивалась на значительно более жесткое сопротивление, и война в восточной Украине зашла в тупик. Даже хуже (с российской точки зрения), война разожгла антироссийские настроения в Украине и превратила эту страну из союзника в заклятого врага.

Taken together, Russia’s wars in the Caucasus and Ukraine in the early twenty-first century can hardly be described as very successful. Though they have boosted Russia’s prestige as a great power, they have also increased distrust and animosity towards Russia, and in economic terms they have been a losing enterprise. Tourist resorts in Crimea and decrepit Soviet-era factories in Luhansk and Donetsk hardly balance the price of financing the war, and they certainly do not offset the costs of capital flight and international sanctions. To realise the limitations of the Russian policy, one just needs to compare the immense economic progress of peaceful China in the last twenty years to the economic stagnation of ‘victorious’ Russia during the same period.

The brave talk from Moscow notwithstanding, the Russian elite itself is probably well aware of the real costs and benefits of its military adventures, which is why it has so far been very careful not to escalate them. Russia has been following the playground-bully principle: ‘pick on the weakest kid, and don’t beat him up too much, lest the teacher intervenes’. If Putin had conducted his wars in the spirit of Stalin, Peter the Great or Genghis Khan, then Russian tanks would have long ago made a dash for Tbilisi and Kyiv, if not for Warsaw and Berlin. But Putin is neither Genghis nor Stalin. He seems to know better than anyone else that military power cannot go far in the twenty-first century, and that waging a successful war means waging a limited war. Even in Syria, despite the ruthlessness of Russian aerial bombardments, Putin has been careful to minimise the Russian footprint, to let others do all the serious fighting, and to prevent the war from spilling over into neighbouring countries.

Indeed, from Russia’s perspective, all its supposedly aggressive moves in recent years were not the opening gambits of a new global war, but rather an attempt to shore up exposed defences. Russians can justifiably point out that after their peaceful retreats in the late 1980s and early 1990s they were treated like a defeated enemy. The USA and NATO took advantage of Russian weakness, and despite promises to the contrary, expanded NATO to eastern Europe and even to some former Soviet republics. The West went on to ignore Russian interests in the Middle East, invaded Serbia and Iraq on doubtful pretexts, and generally made it very clear to Russia that it can count only on its own military power to protect its sphere of influence from Western incursions. From this perspective, recent Russian military moves can be blamed on Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as much as on Vladimir Putin.

Even more importantly, Putin’s Russia lacks a universal ideology. During the Cold War the USSR relied on the global appeal of communism as much as on the global reach of the Red Army. Putinism, in contrast, has little to offer Cubans, Vietnamese or French intellectuals. Authoritarian nationalism may indeed be spreading in the world, but by its very nature it is not conducive to the establishment of cohesive international blocs. Whereas Polish communism and Russian communism were both committed, at least in theory, to the universal interests of an international working class, Polish nationalism and Russian nationalism are by definition committed to opposing interests. As Putin’s rise sparks an upsurge of Polish nationalism, this will only make Poland more anti-Russian than before.

We are repeatedly told these days that we are living in a new and frightening era of ‘post-truth’, and that lies and fictions are all around us. Examples are not hard to come by. Thus in late February 2014 Russian special units bearing no army insignia invaded Ukraine and occupied key installations in Crimea. The Russian government and President Putin in person repeatedly denied that these were Russian troops, and described them as spontaneous ‘self-defence groups’ that may have acquired Russian-looking equipment from local shops. As they voiced this rather preposterous claim, Putin and his aides knew perfectly well that they were lying.

Russian nationalists can excuse this lie by arguing that it served a higher truth. Russia was engaged in a just war, and if it is OK to kill for a just cause, surely it is also OK to lie? The higher cause that allegedly justified the invasion of Ukraine was the preservation of the sacred Russian nation. According to Russian national myths, Russia is a sacred entity that has endured for a thousand years despite repeated attempts by vicious enemies to invade and dismember it. Following the Mongols, the Poles, the Swedes, Napoleon’s Grande Armée and Hitler’s Wehrmacht, in the 1990s it was NATO, the USA and the EU that attempted to destroy Russia by detaching parts of its body and forming them into ‘fake countries’ such as Ukraine. For many Russian nationalists, the idea that Ukraine is a separate nation from Russia constitutes a far bigger lie than anything uttered by President Putin during his holy mission to reintegrate the Russian nation.

Ukrainian citizens, outside observers and professional historians may well be outraged by this explanation, and regard it as a kind of ‘atom-bomb lie’ in the Russian arsenal of deception. To claim that Ukraine does not exist as a nation and as an independent country disregards a long list of historical facts – for example, that during the thousand years of supposed Russian unity, Kyiv and Moscow were part of the same country for only about 300 years. It also violates numerous international laws and treaties that Russia has previously accepted and that have safeguarded the sovereignty and borders of independent Ukraine. Most importantly, it ignores what millions of Ukrainians think about themselves. Don’t they have a say about who they are?

Ukrainian nationalists would certainly agree with Russian nationalists that there are some fake countries around. But Ukraine isn’t one of them. Rather, these fake countries are the ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’ and the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ that Russia has set up to mask its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Whichever side you support, it seems that we are indeed living in a terrifying era of post-truth, when not just particular military incidents, but entire histories and nations might be faked. But if this is the era of post-truth, when, exactly, was the halcyon age of truth? In the 1980s? The 1950s? The 1930s? And what triggered our transition to the post-truth era – the Internet? Social media? The rise of Putin and Trump?

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (‘nobody’s land’), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history.

In the early twentieth century a favourite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of ‘a people without a land [the Jews] to a land without a people [Palestine]’. The existence of the local Arab population was conveniently ignored. In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn’t exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli Parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter ‘p’ does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, ‘f’ stands for ‘p’, and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.)

Сегодня нам постоянно говорят, что мы живем в новую и пугающую эру «постправды», и что ложь и вымысел всюду окружают нас. За примерами далеко ходить не надо. В конце февраля 2014 года российские специальные войска без каких-либо опознавательных знаков, вторглись в Украину и оккупировали стратегические объекты в Крыму. Российское правительство и лично президент Путин несколько раз отрицали, что это были российские войска, и описывали их как стихийные «отряды самообороны», которые приобрели униформу, похожую на российскую, в местных магазинах. Когда они делали такие довольно нелепые утверждения, Путин и его соратники прекрасно знали, что они врут.

Российские националисты могут найти оправдания этой лжи, заявив, что она служила высшей цели. Россия вступила в праведную войну, и если допустимо убивать ради праведной цели, то, конечно, допустимо и врать? Высшая цель, которая якобы оправдывала вторжение в Украину, — это сохранение священной российской нации. Согласно российским национальным мифам, Россия — это священное объединение, которое сохранялось на протяжении тысяч лет, несмотря на повторяющиеся попытки злобных врагов завоевать и разделить ее на части. Следуя по стопам монголов, поляков, шведов, армии Наполеона и гитлеровского Вермахта, в 90-х НАТО, США и ЕС попытались уничтожить Россию, отрезав от нее части и создав из них «страны-фейки», в том числе Украину. Для многих российских националистов идея того, что Украина — отдельная от России страна, — это намного большая ложь, чем все, что сказал президент Путин во время своей священной миссии по восстановлению российской нации.

Facebook, Trump or Putin

Today Ukrainians complain that Putin has successfully deceived many Western media outlets about Russia’s actions in Crimea and Donbas. Yet in the art of deception he can hardly hold a candle to Stalin.

Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens

In Ukraine, for example, Russian soldiers are really fighting, thousands have really died, and hundreds of thousands have really lost their homes.